June 30, 2014

PARIS, FRANCE – BittWare, a premier board supplier for over 25 years, announced today at the TERATEC 2014 Forum the release of its newest board, the A5-PCIe-L (A5PL) low profile PCIe board based on Altera’s Arria® V GZ FPGA. The high-performance, power and cost-efficient Arria V GZ provides a high level of system integration and flexibility for I/O, routing, and processing that enables BittWare’s A5PL to be a solid platform for network processing, security, broadcast, and signals intelligence applications. Featuring dual QSFP+ cages that run up to 12.5 Gbps, the A5PL provides dual 40GigE or octal 10GigE ports using optical transceivers as well as passive copper cabling up to 8 meters. These ports are serviced by the advanced 28nm Arria V GZ FPGA, which is in turn supported by a Gen3 x8 PCIe interface and either 8 GB DDR3, 1 GB RLDRAM3, or 64 MB QDRII+. Sophisticated time-stamping and synchronization options are supported by dual SMA connectors for interfacing to 1PPS or 10MHz reference clocks, in addition to the tunable on-board high accuracy, temperature compensated oscillator (TCXO). A comprehensive Board Management Controller (BMC) with host software support for advanced system monitoring is also provided.

“For over a decade, we’ve been completely focused on delivering solid, high quality, high performance, Altera-based FPGA platforms that are fully validated and ready to deploy,” stated Jeff Milrod, President & CEO of BittWare. “As a result, BittWare has earned a reputation as a premier high-end supplier. The Arria V GZ has now enabled us to utilize our extensive expertise to deliver a much more aggressive cost/capability product in the A5PL – without compromising features, versatility, or quality. We believe that the A5PL makes FPGA technology more accessible to a broader market, thus facilitating its rapid adoption in network and packet processing applications.”

A5PL Overview

BittWare’s A5-PCIe-L (A5PL) is a low-profile PCIe x8 card based on the Altera Arria V GZ FPGA. The high-performance, power and cost-efficient Arria V GZ provides a high level of system integration and flexibility for I/O, routing, and processing:

High performance Altera Arria V GZ FPGA

PCIe x8 interface supporting Gen1, Gen2, or Gen3

Dual QSFP+ cages for 2x 40GigE or 8x 10GigE

Support for a wide range of optical transceivers

Built in low-latency active drivers/receivers for passive copper cables up to 8 meters

Memory options (pick one):

DDR3: single 64-bit bank of up to 8 GBytes DDR3-1600 with ECC

RLDRAM3: two 18-bit banks of up to 512 MB each (1 GB total)

QDRII+: two 18-bit banks of up to 288 Mb each (576 Mb, or 64 MB total)

Board Management Controller for Intelligent Platform Management

USB 2.0 for programming, debug, or control

Timestamping and synchronization support

Dual SMA for reference clock/synchronization inputs

Tunable high-accuracy TCXO

Programmable clock synthesizer (Si5338)

Broad range of IP offerings

MAC/PHY

TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOE)

PTP/IEEE-1588

PCIe RDMA

A5PL Price and Availability

BittWare’s A5PL board is available for ordering now, with shipments starting in September 2014. Volume pricing starts at $1,450 in 1000s for the A5PL with the Arria V GZ E1 with no external memory. Contact BittWare for addition configurations, pricing, and details.

About BittWare, Inc.

For 25 years, BittWare has designed and deployed high-end signal processing, network processing, and high performance computing board-level solutions that significantly reduce technology risk and time-to revenue for our OEM customers. Our products are exclusively based on the latest FPGA technology from Altera and industry-standard COTS form factors including PCIe, VPX / OpenVPX, AMC, XMC and FMC (VITA 57). When customer requirements make it difficult to use industry-standard boards, BittWare can provide modified solutions, and/or licensed designs for applications in the financial, communications, instrumentation and military/aerospace markets. For more information on BittWare and its innovative FPGA COTS solutions, visit www.bittware.com.